We give a syntactic correspondence between non-associative arithmetic circuits and acyclic weighted tree automata. We may then export results from automata theory to non-associative circuits and characterize the size of a minimal circuit for a given polynomial as the rank of a Hankel matrix. We will then show how this can be used to re-obtain Nisan's theorem on Algebraic Branching Programs as well as recent results on Unique Parse Tree circuits. Lastly, we will highlight a new way of obtaining lower bounds for general (associative) arithmetic circuits.